The 10 Best-Selling Video Games of All Time, by Publisher-Reported Sales

"Minecraft" leads at 425 million-plus copies, and the lead isn't close. That's the verdict, and here's the method that keeps it honest, stated before the first entry so you can argue with it while you read. Confirmation status up front: every figure on this list comes from the company that publishes the game, in that company's own statement or investor page, and every entry names its reporter, its wording and its date.

The Criteria, the Scope and the Cutoff, Stated Before the List Starts

Criteria, one line each. A figure qualifies only if the game's own publisher reported it — no tracker estimates, no roundup numbers, no figures a publisher never confirmed. Single games only: franchise totals don't enter, so the "Grand Theft Auto" series total and the "Minecraft" franchise's spin-offs sit outside, and only the named game's own count runs. Each game is counted the way its publisher counts it, and the entry prints that method in its first sentence, because the methods differ and the difference is material.

Scope, in the same breath. The population checked for this list is every game with a publisher-reported figure in the three named source sets: Nintendo's IR top-selling-title pages, Take-Two Interactive's earnings materials and investor presentations, and Microsoft's and Mojang's published statements. Games from publishers outside those three sets aren't ranked here, however large their reported totals run elsewhere — that's a limit of this list's sourcing, stated plainly rather than smoothed over. Cutoff: November 9, 2026. Figures published after that date, including any that land in earnings calls scheduled this week, don't move this ranking until the desk re-runs it.

1. "Minecraft" — Microsoft — 425 Million-Plus Copies Sold

Microsoft's figure, in Microsoft's voice: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma stated on September 26, 2026, after Minecraft Live, that the game has passed "425M+ copies sold" after "17+ years." Mojang's own recap of Minecraft Live 2023 anchors the same line earlier, recording that the game had "crossed 300 million copies sold" as of October 15, 2023. Watch what that growth means in your own terms: the game added a second catalog's worth of sales after its fifteenth birthday, and it did it as a paid purchase, not a free download count. Nobody else on this list is within 190 million of it.

2. "Grand Theft Auto V" — Take-Two Interactive — Over 230 Million Units Sold-In

Take-Two reported "Grand Theft Auto V" at over 230 million units sold-in in its August 2026 investor presentation, and the company's Q3 fiscal 2026 call had already put the title at over 225 million sold-in for the quarter ended December 31, 2025. Sold-in is Take-Two's wording and it matters: the count covers units sold into retail channels plus digital sales, as Take-Two counts them, across the game's three console generations since its 2013 launch. A game old enough to have launched on hardware your couch setup retired years ago is still adding five million units a quarter, per its publisher's own cadence of updates.

3. "Red Dead Redemption 2" — Take-Two Interactive — Over 87 Million Units Sold-In

Take-Two's August 2026 investor presentation put "Red Dead Redemption 2" at over 87 million units sold-in, with the wider "Red Dead Redemption" series near 116 million — and only the single game's figure runs here, per the criteria above. The game launched in October 2018, five years after the entry above it, and it has already cleared every Nintendo-published total on this list except one. If you're keeping score at home, one publisher, Rockstar's parent, holds ranks two and three with two games from one studio.

4. "Wii Sports" — Nintendo — 82.79 Million Units

Nintendo reported "Wii Sports" at 82.79 million units on its IR top-selling Wii page, as of September 30, 2016, and Nintendo's note on that page states the units include the quantity bundled with hardware. That bundle is the context, not a disqualifier: the game rode inside the Wii box across most of the world, and Nintendo counts those copies as sales, labeled as such on its own page. It's still the biggest single-platform total Nintendo has ever printed, and a motion-control pack-in from 2006 outranks every Switch title outright.

5. "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe" — Nintendo — 72.00 Million Units

Nintendo reported "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe" at 72.00 million units on its IR top-selling Nintendo Switch page, as of September 30, 2026, with downloadable versions and bundled units included per Nintendo's notes on that page. The figure counts the Switch release only — Nintendo reports the Wii U original separately, and this list follows Nintendo's split rather than merging the two into a combined total nobody at Nintendo published. Even split, the Switch version alone is the best-selling game on the best-selling Nintendo system of its era, and it reached that mark as a port of a 2014 game.

6. "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" — Nintendo — 50.63 Million Units

Nintendo reported "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" at 50.63 million units on the same IR Switch page, as of September 30, 2026. A slow life-simulation game about paying off a home loan to a raccoon outsold every shooter, sports title and open-world game its publisher has ever released on the system. The practical read for your weekend: this is the entry that proves the list isn't a power ranking of genres — it's a receipt, and the receipt says half the Switch audience bought the quiet game.

7. "Super Mario Bros." — Nintendo — 40.24 Million Units

Nintendo's historical sales data puts the original "Super Mario Bros." for the NES at 40.24 million units, as of December 31, 2014, a figure carried in the sources list below with its relay named, because Nintendo's current IR pages don't publish a NES top-selling page. The game launched in 1985 and held the best-selling-game title for over two decades. Its number hasn't moved in years because the platform's sales ended years ago — every figure above it on this list except one is still growing, and this is the only entry whose total is finished.

8. "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" — Nintendo — 38.50 Million Units

Nintendo reported "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" at 38.50 million units on its IR Switch page, as of September 30, 2026. A fighting game whose roster is a licensing negotiation printed on a disc — nearly every major publisher's characters in one product — became its own publisher's third-biggest Switch title. The margin over the next entry is 1.67 million units, and both figures come from Nintendo pages, so for once on this list you're comparing two totals counted under one company's rules.

9. "Mario Kart Wii" — Nintendo — 36.83 Million Units

Nintendo reported "Mario Kart Wii" at 36.83 million units on its IR Wii page, as of September 30, 2016, bundled units included per Nintendo's note. Two "Mario Kart" games sit in the all-time ten, a decade apart, on two different systems, and the older one did it with a plastic wheel packed into the box. If a friend tells you the series is a system-seller, this pair of entries is the receipt — the franchise appears on this list more often than any other, and it isn't done, since the Deluxe entry above it still sells.

10. "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" — Nintendo — 34.28 Million Units

Nintendo reported the Switch version of "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" at 34.28 million units on its IR Switch page, as of September 30, 2026. Nintendo reports the Wii U version on its own page and this list doesn't add the two together, because Nintendo never published a combined figure — the entry runs on the Switch count alone and still holds the tenth slot. The first title out is "Wii Sports Resort" at 32.99 million units on Nintendo's Wii page, 1.29 million behind, so the margin at the cut is on the record and it's a Nintendo game chasing a Nintendo game.

Read the list once more with the labels on and a pattern shows up that the raw ranking hides. The top three are cross-platform totals reported by two publishers in their own currencies of counting — copies sold, units sold-in — and ranks four through ten are one company's per-platform ledger, bundles included, printed to two decimal places. Both kinds are publisher-reported. They aren't the same kind of fact, and any version of this list that strips the labels off has taken the one honest thing about it away. When the next earnings week moves a figure, our explainer on what monthly active users actually count will keep you from trading a sales rank for a door count, our numbers explainer separates copies from players from the crowd playing right now, and our Switch 2 versus PS5 account shows how two makers' sales claims read when you grade them on the same clock.